That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime - Season 1 Review

I often try to avoid dropping animes, especially when I am fairly far in, however with Slime I was very tempted to - it was a drag to watch. In my previous Slime review, I stated that I thought the anime was getting better - how wrong I was. Finishing it this season was a drag, and I certainly won’t be picking up season 2.

It’s surprising to see the positive reception that the anime has received on My Anime List. Usually, I’m a fan of isekais, however slime was simply boring to watch. I’ll explain why below.

Story & Characters

This is one of the more disappointing aspects of the anime - to put it bluntly, the story is simply an overpowered slime running around, making friends and killing things that it can’t make friends with.

A slightly extended version is this - a man gets stabbed in the streets of Japan (the anime makes sure that you know they are a virgin), and when he dies, he essentially gets reincarnated as a slime in a different world. And then the above applies - he simply runs around, kills things that are against him and inherits their power, and makes friends with every single thing he comes into contact with. The slime has never been defeated - it manages to win every, single, battle, making the anime repetitive and frankly boring. Oh, and don’t forget, he died a virgin.

Pacing is terrible - no character development is done, no world building is done, it simply changes from one arc to another. Every fight scene is over quickly, due to the slimes overpowered nature, with him moving away with a bored expression, after consuming the opponent to gain even more power. Here is how a fight goes - enemy appears, slime plays around with them for a few dozen seconds, then the slime wins. Imagine that, 20 times. Then, the arc is suddenly over, with an anti-climatic ending. And off goes the slime, to find another opponent that will supposedly ‘won’t be easy’, and then is thrashed in a short space of a minute. Thus, there is no tension - in a battle, you know who is going to win.

The anime introduces the female characters like so - here is fanservice character #1, fanservice character #2, and so on. And don’t forget, they have big boobs. The male characters are barely introduced - after all, why focus on them when you can focus on boobs? Remove all the characters of the anime apart from the slime, and little would change - they are that flat and undeveloped.

Milim, a ‘2000 year old’ girl who looks about 12, running around in a skimpy bikini, is portrayed as one of the most powerful beings in the planet. Oh, but she was ‘defeated’ with a spoon of honey, to which the slimes followers exclaimed praise that it was ‘A feat which only Rimuru-san can accomplish’.

In the last arc, that was rushed to, the characters were simply glossed over; I found that I knew very little of the personality of the characters. They had no personality at all, being given one trait, and having it left at that. The author has a very short attention span, simply skipping to another arc when they fancy, leaving character and world development in the dust behind them. The slime decides to ditch his civilization to go help some random kids, resolving the conflict separately from the characters, thus making him useless - any old person could have solved it. But hey, this gives the author an opportunity to run off to some other undeveloped location with undeveloped characters and try to rub the ‘importance’ of the slime in everyones face.

As said, I’m usually a fan of isekais, but the dead, undeveloped and repetitive storyline of this one simply killed it for me. Shallow writing makes this one of the worst stories in any show I’ve watched.

Animation

To give the anime it’s credit, the animation is fine. There have been some oddities, particularly regarding running scenes with the wolf, however I certainly can’t complain about the animation. However, I’ve seen much, much, worse (I’m looking at you Berserk 2016).

I did find that after the first episode, where the art was incredibly detailed in all areas, it did go from great to fine.

Sound

This was okay - I like the outro song, despite it being rather forgettable. However throughout the anime I found that certain parts of music did not fit the scenes at all. It wasn’t something that blew me away, but it wasn’t as bad as the storyline of the anime.

Conclusion

You may think that I’m being a little harsh - I’m not. Why did I finish this? Because I like completing what I start. If it wasn’t for the decent animation, the anime would have been even more of a struggle to watch. I would not have been able to finish it without the weekly spacing.

So, why the rating? The storyline. To summarize, it was undeveloped, flat, and simply boring to watch. Characters had no personality, the world was unexplained, and the author rushed to different arcs every episode essentially, leaving the previous one ending rapidly and badly. The slime was overpowered, simply destroying everything that came against it, or more often the case, making a friend of everything that was unlucky enough to encounter it.

Oh, as a side note, the last episode of season 1 is just a recap of the terrible season, with a demon and the dragon talking to each other. Waste of time watching.

Give That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime a pass. It’s not worth your time to watch, and you’ll probably regret it as you suffer through more episodes.

tl;dr: Give this a hard pass. A shallow and undeveloped storyline only supported by decent animation.